In SA, Famous Brands produces 265,000 cups of specially blended coffee a day. With 2,175 restaurants, the company, whose brands include Wimpy, Steers and Mugg & Bean, also makes 77m ice-cream cones a year. It's the big daddy of SA franchising, with a R9,7bn market capitalisation, and it wants to repeat its local success in the rest of Africa.

After 23 years in SA's R6bn fruit industry, many of them as managing director of Tru-Cape Fruit Marketing - SA's biggest producer of apples and pears - Charles Hughes is retiring without having fulfilled his ambition of gaining access to China's vast market. He blames it on the SA government.

Game Stores has come a long way since it opened its first store in Durban in 1970 in cramped premises in the city's CBD, ringing up sales of R78 000 in its first month of trading. Its founders believed that shopping had become a tedious and boring pastime. They wanted to create a fun shopping environment and so conceptualised retailing as a game. The signature bright pink prevails to this day.